AllMovie

With a stunning mountain setting and a simple, poignant, and tragic story, director Chung Jin Woo crafts a tale about a pure-hearted, inwardly strong girl adopted into the home of a coal-maker and his mother. The girl matures into a charming and beautiful woman -- and after they fall in love, she becomes the wife of the coal-maker. Their bucolic life together is torn apart when a forest guard decides he wants the wife for himself and manages to get the coal-maker thrown into prison for ten years. Consistently true to her jailed husband, the young woman devises a way out of her dilemma, a scheme born only by desperation and the impossible odds of standing up to the forest guard and the strict society around her.